Theater Reviews: Divorce! The Musical, Grand Motel, The Jazz Age

Also, Call Me Mister Fry, Blues for Central Avenue and more

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Wednesday, Feb 18 2009

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TIME STANDS STILL is Donald Margulies’ newest work, being given its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse. It would be nice to see our institutional theaters dip a bit deeper into the lake of American playwrights (perhaps lesser-known ones) so that, as with the National Theatre of Great Britain for example, the theaters can take credit for promoting new voices, rather than just riding on the coattails of the established ones, but that’s not the world we live in. It is, nonetheless, a relief and a pleasure to see such thoughtful and well-crafted new writing on the stage. Margulies is a compassionate observer of human behavior, and his play concerns a photojournalist (Anna Gunn), just returned to her Brooklyn digs from a German hospital after being struck by a roadside bomb in Iraq. She barks at her life partner who’s a reporter (David Harbour) over his concerned reluctance to offer her a cup of coffee in public; her pithy attack seems on the surface to be over nothing but a cup of coffee. The play is actually about all that lies underneath — the morality of her career as a photojournalist that feeds on the miseries on the world, and spews it back in the form of coffee-table books. One of Margulies’ sourer points is the service such journalists provides to liberal consumers who use bad news in the press to fuel their outrage over injustice, and to assuage their guilt over doing nothing about it. But would the world really be better without such journalists, and without those images? Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood; Tues.-Thurs., 7:30 p.m.; Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 4 & 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; through March 15. (310) 208-5454. (Steven Leigh Morris) See Theater feature.

Darrett Sanders

Film

Craig Schwartz

Divorce! The Musical

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THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOLDS Playwright Jonathan Tolins’ drama of ethics is part moral debate and part family tragedy, in which righteousness comes into direct conflict with pragmatism. On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a young married couple — Suzanne (Gretchen Koerner) and her husband Rob (Bryan Okes Fuller) — are delighted when they learn Suzanne is pregnant, and Rob convinces her to allow the fetus to undergo an experimental genetics test. The test comes back positive – positive for probable homosexuality, that is. Much to the shock of Suzanne’s charming, artistic gay younger brother David (Eli Kranski), the couple seriously considers aborting the infant, rather than raise a gay son – a choice that is tacitly backed by David’s seemingly kind and liberal parents (Penny Peyser and Mark L. Taylor). The debate between David and his bewildered and increasingly hostile family shifts from being a simple meditation on “right to life” issues to a confrontation in which David feels he has to justify his own existence. Although director T.K. Kolman’s straightforward production aptly conveys the subtext of hostility and mutual incomprehension lurking beneath the apparently happy family’s relations, the staging often lacks nuance and comes across as stodgy. Many exchanges consist of loud roaring and arm waving histrionics, a problem exacerbated by the padded talkiness of Tolins’ dialogue. Kranski adds some haunting dimension as the hurt, appalled gay son, and so does Koerner, as the guilt-racked older sister. Chandler Studio Theater, 12443 Chandler Blvd, North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through March 14. The Production Company. (Paul Birchall)